Amazon Prime Video
Last night I was miffed to find that a Leaf hockey game was on Monday Night Hockey, a new streaming feature from Amazon Prime that borrows from Monday Night Football (which has been around in the US and on cable in Canada for decades).
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Luckily, I'm still going through a free trial of Prime so I didn't miss the game. But it was a drag, not being able to just turn on the TV and watch. The Prime video wasn't always smooth with the old Pentium i3 I have in my bedroom running Windows 10. Fortunately, I've dual-booted that PC with Linux so the picture was okay with the Linux half of the PC. (Anyone who has compared Windows to Linux will know that Windows 10 and 11 are resource hogs, making videos stutter on older machines).
Rendering older PCs obsolete is not 'green' nor helpful to the environment. But that's another story of corporate greed and hypocrisy. What bugs me today is how all the good shows on TV are diversified. Each streaming service has one or maybe two good shows with a lot of junk, while regular TV is just a lot of junk.
The viewing landscape wasn't always like this. Back in ancient times when cable first arrived you could watch all the good stuff, ad-supported, at no extra charge. Then slowly but surely specialty channels arrived, and we've seen a steady decline in quality content for regular TV with every passing year.
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Now my beloved hockey has taken a hit. If I want to see Monday night Leaf games, I need to shell out for Amazon Prime.
Do I want to do that?
I don't think so.
That aggressive acquisition strategy by the Bezos team is annoying and makes me less inclined to subscribe.
As for the actual coverage, the American production was adequate but not the same as watching a Canadian team on a Canadian channel (even if the woman on the panel happens to be polished and lovely).
Netflix
Netflix is having a booming quarter. The introduction of the very reasonable ad-supported plan in Canada has got me hooked, even if Trudeau and his 'culture' cronies slapped a streaming tax on it.
Leading Netflix right now is The Lincoln Lawyer, which is a pretty good mashup of the old Rockford Files with, say, McCloud and Perry Mason. The lead and supporting cast are solid with no weak links in the chain so it's a fun watch. And Elliott Gould as the sagely "Legal" is a treat. He proves that getting older really can mean getting better.
But something tells me the clock is ticking on the low cost of Netflix with ads in Canada. It's almost too good to be true.
Will we continue to get some actual bang for our buck or just be fooled again?
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